On Feb 6, 6:24 pm, e <evier...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What;s Ralph all about? You've certainly peaked *my* interest. Maybe we
> should get that running on top of a JVM so it doesn't go extinct again.
Ralph is what Dylan was called before Apple publicly announced it. It
was essentially Scheme + CLOS + some functional programming
conveniences, minus some historical baggage.
Eventually Apple renamed Ralph to "Dylan" (there are a few funny
stories there) and announced it to the world. Subsequently, under
enormous pressure from some influential people who, as it turned out,
never used the language for anything significant, its syntax was
changed from a Lisp-like syntax to something approximating Object
Pascal or Modula 2. Soon afterward, Apple decided that it was crazy to
have thought it could design a programming language and it canceled
every project with the slightest connection to Dylan and promptly
erased the language from corporate memory. At one point I approached
Apple about open-sourcing Dylan and it essentially pretended it had no
idea what I was talking about.
Clojure is extremely similar in spirit to Ralph, and it adds several
more modern concepts that I think are improvements, such as
immutability by default, Clojure's excellent concurrency support, and
the pervasive use of the sequence abstraction. The main thing missing
from Clojure, relative to Ralph, is a CLOS-like object system. Rich
clearly decided that Clojure didn't need such a thing, and I am
sympathetic to his view.
Personally, I like CLOS-like object systems very much, but if I really
need one, it would be easier to build one for Clojure than to rebuild
Ralph and then update it to have all the nice features of Clojure.
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